I was a commuter student all four years, thirty miles each way, so no fun dorm stories. I do recall registering for classes by touch tone phone. Waiting till my assigned time, dialing repeatedly until I got through, and then hoping not to make a mistake and have to start over or end up in the wrong class or get cut off somehow. Had to have a lot of alternates ready in case classes were full.
I did my homework on a KayPro “portable” computer.
January 1977 - I took a Greyhound bus with one suitcase from Santa Monica, California to Western Washington State College (Bellingham), a VERY commuter school - my family was beyond broke (my single mother waitressed full-time, and we never had a car) - fast forward about 5 weeks, I called home collect from the payphone down the hall…I was shocked that my mom accepted the call. I told her I was homesick (I actually didn’t miss home, I just didn’t fit in to northern Washington state from hippy-town Venice, California) - I asked her for a “care package” - she asked what that would entail, I said something along the lines of “cookies, some candy” her exact words were “You don’t live in Kathmandu! You want cookies? Go to the store and buy some! This call is costing a fortune.” and she hung up. Today I can laugh at the absurdity of it, but at the time I was heartbroken.
On the positive side, it gave me a soft spot for my own D when she went away to college…I flew across the country to help move her in, I always (ALWAYS) answered her phone calls (and still do), and listened regardless of the prattle, and I would mail her her favorite gum with Gary Larson jokes from my one-a-day calendar…just because.
We were provided with 20 meals a week – three on M-Sat, and only breakfast and a mid-day “dinner” on Sunday. Sunday night, the entire campus of ~10,000 people tried to order pizza to be delivered. The town’s restaurants couldn’t handle it. I remember once the pizza place took my order and, after I hung up, I realized they hadn’t asked for my name or address.
It was total chaos.
Fun times. Not.
My mom got me an Olivetti electric typewriter for college for free when she opened a bank account! Getting free gifts from banks was akin to an Olympic sport in my mom’s family so this was a real coup.
My roommate and I both had a 10 meal plan so we would eat lunch and dinner at the dining commons Monday through Friday. We had both a refrigerator and microwave in our room as well as a toaster. We would have instant oatmeal or cereal for breakfast or poptarts that our moms provided for us. We also had Tab in the refrigerator. My roommate brought a small tv so we could watch GH in our dorm room. We had a full kitchen on each floor of our dorm. We would make mac and cheese for dinner on the weekend especially if we were going out as we saved our money for beer! There was a Jack in the Box right behind our dorm and we ate many chicken sandwiches there on weekends. Any friends that had the weekend meal plan would give us their cards to use if the were away and we could stock up on sandwiches and chips.
My roommate and I took the names?
I guess I should explain…folks would call our room and try to order a pizza. Their first call, we would tell them they had the wrong number…and give them the right number. It was when they called back a second time (?♀️) that we took their orders!
We begged the phone company to change our number…but they refused.
a prized possession was an electric Smith Corona typewriter with the cartridge ribbon system. If you mis-spelled a word you would put in the cartridge with white erasure ink to remove it. The color never really matched the paper color, but it was better than retyping the whole page.
Being away from home, drinking was a new diversion. The most popular guys on the floor were the transfer students who were 21 and were happy to make beer runs. Also going to football games; I was a young looking 18 but this was a time when they sold beer in college football stadiums. The people behind the counter didn’t blink an eye when I would order a beer.
Living in the dorms, on Saturday one of the featured items for dinner would be called “manager’s choice”, a casserole of some kind. We quickly figured it meant the manager chose to get rid of all the leftovers from the week.
Back in the pre-FERPA days the profs used to post the roll sheet outside their office with the final exam and class grade. Later they changed to hiding the name column and leaving the student ID number visible. If you wanted your grades earlier you turned in a self-addressed postcard with your final exam; our postman knew how I was doing before I did.
I remember that the dorm buildings were built in the 1960s or earlier mostly with one bathroom per floor. But most of them became completely coed some time later, with coed bathrooms, though there were single-gender floors for those who chose them. Apparently few (but non-zero) chose the single-gender floors on their room assignment forms (which did disclose the coed bathrooms on the coed floors), since there were few single-gender floors compared to coed floors.
I was a freshman in 1977. Mid sized midwest university. Three years of dorms and never with a community bathroom.
1st year - 4 of us in a 4-bed suite that included common room, bedroom and bathroom.
2nd-3rd year - 4 of us in a 4-bed suite that included two bedrooms, common room and bathroom.
That was way more space than my 9 years younger brother had at his Michigan flagship 9 years later.
Freshman year I was in a suite with 7 other girls. Three of us in 2 rooms shared one phone line. One of the other girls had a boyfriend back home and very strict parents from ‘the old country’ who didn’t approve of said boyfriend. One weekend this girl went back home (to VA from MO so not just a short trip) to spend the weekend with the boyfriend and we were instructed to lie to her dad if he called. Of course this was back before caller ID and answering machines so we couldn’t just screen our calls for the whole weekend. I was such a goody two shoes that I was really uncomfortable with the whole situation. I did end up managing to tell him that Rita was in the library and would get back to him when she got back a couple of times.
I missed the days of having a drinking age of 18 or 19 by a couple of years but our campus had a policy that beer in kegs could be served at on-campus parties as long as the parties had people checking that only actual students were attending. This was in St Louis so pretty much all Bud Light, unless someone got fancy and we had Michelob :-).
One of my suite mates actually had an IBM computer by junior year, and a printer. The only useful thing back in those days if you weren’t into programming was word processing and she was generous about letting all of us use it for our papers. It definitely was a step up from the typewriter.
I remember getting an email address for the first time. Of course, the only other people I knew who had email addresses worked in the same lab I did. So we could send each other email from across the hall or across the office just for kicks, but it wasn’t terribly useful until a whole lot more people had it and started actually using it for communicating.
Email? I didn’t know what that was until about 27 years after I graduated from college. And even then, it was Lotus Notes.
I was in a major funk following a bad breakup so some friends decided a road trip to Vegas was what I needed (about a five hour drive). This before everyone had credit cards but you could write a check for $20 over the purchase at the grocery store. We stopped at as many as we could find to amass the cash needed to play the $1 blackjack tables while drinking the free alcohol and eating 99 cent shrimp cocktails. Rented a sketchy hotel room (by the hour ?) to sleep it off and returned home the next day.
Ended up getting back together with my boyfriend and eventually married him. We’ll celebrate our 35 wedding anniversary next year.
Another commuter here. I was also a work-study in the housing office. A few of us had a serious crush on the IBM repairman, so I’d sharpen pencils over the works to jam them up and necessitate a service call.
I remember living in the dorm on a co-ed floor with one bathroom. Went to use the restroom for the first time at the start of the year and my eyes caught the legs/feet of the person who was in the next stall–facing the wrong way! My heart fell to my stomach for a moment, thinking I’d gone into the wrong bathroom. Then I realized the bathroom must be co-ed. Took some getting used to but we all did. This was around 1981. Funny, none of my kids experienced co-ed bathrooms at any of their schools.
I had culture shock moving from NY to TX. I did not get that people didn’t tell you what they really though of you. In NY you always knew who did and didn’t like you. I rushed a sorority (bad move) with almost no knowledge of sororities in the south. It was not a pretty situation. The first guy I dated in college was nice but somehow the chemistry was off. We ended up being friends for all four years. He dated one of my roommates and she couldn’t understand why their chemistry was off. Later he admitted he was gay! Totally made sense. We all got along great after everyone understood where they stood.
I remember my first off campus apartment (furnished) has yellow shag carpet, orange tile in the kitchen with green appliances. My typewriter was my best friend. Loved the built in correction ribbon!
I had a computer programming class where we had to program using punch cards! (They gave that up the next year) One of my professors also had us learn to program an analog computer using plug in wires.
My school was truly small. We had a single building, 3 stories, that housed the classrooms, labs & library. There was a big board on the first floor where anyone who wanted could tack up anything they wanted to say. This was long before the internet, and I think it was pretty cool that we were able to have this anonymous way to say stuff way back then … and no one was a jerk, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Anyone else have a triple bunk bed? My roommate and I (the third never showed) said that if something happened to us, we wanted to be buried in the triple bunk bed…sort of looking like the three stooges triple bunk.
My roommate and I each owned a clock radio. Those were the total electronic items in our room. Our friends who lived down the hall had a TV and a stereo! Guess where we hung out?
Almost no one had a dorm fridge so we used to put beer out on the windowsill to keep it cold (4th floor).
The drinking age at the time was 19 for beer and wine, but a college ID got you in the door so…
Parents never came to visit except on parents weekend.
The Fiji frat house was right next door to my dorm (Christopher Cross played a concert there before he became famous). They loved to blast their loud music very late at night. It was so annoying! To retaliate, early one Saturday morning, all the girls on the side of the dorm nearest the frat house put their stereo speakers in the open windows and played music from the local classical station. 
One year, just before everyone was leaving for Thanksgiving, it started SNOWING!!! W all went outside and had a big snowball fight with the Fijis.
I loved college.
At my teeny freshman year college, all classes were cancelled the first time there was a significant snowfall, and there was a winter carnival. Snow man sculptures were done in front of every dorm, Hot chocolate served all day in the dining hall. Sledding contests using trays from the cafe…just loads of fun!